Poverty and social background remain huge barriers in all highly educated fields except for computer science/development/sysadmin.
We're very much the exception not the norm. As much as my mother believed I could be anything I would not be able to drag myself through university even without external factors pushing me down and throwing me around like a sack of meat.. for years..
We're _better_ than other fields, but definitely not an exception. I grew up in a formerly upper upper middle class family that didn't have very much money due to medical and mental health issues. I'm only ~5 years out of uni but my success at every point in my education and career so far made it credible to me that credentialism and reliance on personal connections wasn't a significant factor in tech careers (as opposed to merit).
But it's recently become pretty clear to me that all the best opportunities I've ever been exposed to were through connections, and not all of those connections are attributable purely to merit. Had I not had these, I would be doing pretty well on merit, but the fact that I'm doing extraordinarily well is due to the fact that I got opportunities that many others never even had a shot at. About half of these were from family and friends, which has almost nothing to do with revealed merit. The other half was from smart classmates in my CS program, which is a little more correlated with merit. But it's not a coincidence that most of the people in my friend group were somehow similarly upper middle class. I had a really talented, smart friend group, but it's hard to imagine that coming from a similar background didn't have any affect on how easily we got along.
We're very much the exception not the norm. As much as my mother believed I could be anything I would not be able to drag myself through university even without external factors pushing me down and throwing me around like a sack of meat.. for years..